The removal of meat from the bodies and appendages of crustaceans such as crabs have historically been accomplished by hand. This is particularly true in removing the meat from blue crabs found on the eastern seaboard of the United States which are considerably smaller than dungeness and snow crab found on the West Coast of the country.
Skilled workers, commonly referred to as crab pickers, work in crab houses picking the cooked crab meat from the bodies of the crabs. Machines and apparatuses have been developed to separate edible crab meat from nonedible portions of the crab body but almost invariably more fragments of crab shells are found in the meat following this process than is found in crab meat hand picked by crab pickers.
There is a considerable amount of meat in the bodies of East Coast blue crabs and is relatively easy to extract by hand. The claws of these crabs, however, are relatively small, certainly as compared to the claws of dungeness and snow crabs, and are hard and difficult to crack. For this reason, blue crab claws are quite often frozen and sold separately as hors d'oeuvres or the like due to the difficulty of extracting meat therefrom.
A number of machines and apparatuses have been developed for extracting meat from the appendages of crustaceans but a majority of these have been for removing the meat from the legs and claws of the large dungeness, snow and king crab, rather the much smaller pincer claws of the eastern blue crab. These various crab claw meat extracting apparatuses cut the shell or the entire claw to expose the meat in the interior of such claw. This cutting process is usually circumventially around the claw to separate one end from the other end or a transverse cut through the entire claw. In either case, rather large areas of claw shell are cut which greatly increases the chance of splintered shell or shell dust from contaminating the claw meat being extracted.